Sullivan on Religious Insanity

Andrew Sullivan mourns the evils of dueling fundamentalisms on The Daily Dish.

On March 20th, Pastor Terry Jones held a Koran burning in Florida. On Thursday Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, condemned the burning and called for the arrest of Jones. Yesterday, Afghans protested the Koran burning by killing UN workers. And today the deadly protests have spread to Kandahar.

The interaction between Christianism and Islamism could take us all back to the dark ages. Both acts are, to my mind, egregiously unhinged. What on earth does it achieve to burn a holy book? And how screwed up is a religion which responds to this by murdering UN workers? Both mindsets are sick versions of religious fanaticism.

My fear of a Huckabee or Palin as president is precisely their ability to inflame this kind of thing still further, and identify the the entire United States as representative of Christianist excess. The current GOP no longer includes in its leadership even someone like George W. Bush who kept insisting that Islam itself was not the problem, Islamism is.

Today's extremist GOP makes George W. Bush sound like the voice of reason and restraint.

--Ballard Burgher